


Sea Shell Flowers

by fresne



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Hymn to Aphrodite - Sappho
Genre: F/F, Femslash Yuletide, Yuletide 2020, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:47:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28241145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: Agathe sang the song of love that she'd once heard silver haired Sappho sing.Sweet Aphrodite quickly answered on swift dove's wings. Asking only how she could help Agathe light the torch of love.
Relationships: OFC/OFC
Comments: 10
Kudos: 22
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Sea Shell Flowers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ApolloMojave](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApolloMojave/gifts).



Her mother wanted to know how much weaving she'd finished at her friend Dorcas' that day, but Agathe could not bear to answer. Not when her heart was a battered leaf under fate's sandal. She flung herself up the stairs and into her narrow room to stare sorrowfully out the window at the pale moon. 

But no. 

Although sympathetic, it was not Artemis' help that she needed.

A cricket fiddled just outside that window. Agathe ached in sympathy for his song of love and separation by fate. She sighed for love of language. For poetry. For love. For her love. She'd been sighing for hours. For an eternity. Since Eros had freshly pin cushioned her heart at the poetry slam that Dorcas held in her home's gynecium under the guise of weaving linen. It was Agathe who felt as if she were the linen freshly dyed and wrung out when her love offering was found wanting.

Let her brothers crowd into their friends' Androns with calls for pitchers of Dionysian respect amid rounds of withers drying philosophy. Agathe longed for hot desire and tender love. 

She picked up her lyre and plucked at the song that she'd once heard silver haired Sappho play so skillfully, but love soon had her sighing again. The nerves of her body may as well have been the strings of the lyre set too tight. She had to put it aside. She made her prayer. "Aphrodite, I'm wronged in love. Please, I beg you, from your couch on high Olympus, come to my aid. Tell me what I must do to win the heart of the one I love."

The golden goddess arrived by flight of doves as she always did. Lightly. Quickly. She slipped in through the door and pressed her back against the frame. Declaimed, "Tell me all about her? What is her name? What is it you love about her? I want all the details."

Agathe rolled over on her bed, more than eager to talk about her beloved. "Her name is  Efthalia and like her name implies she has love blooming in my heart at the merest glance of her eyes, which are like sylvan pools, but you know also like the sea and I'm drowning." 

Aphrodite, far from criticizing her metaphor, said, "Love it." She sat down beside Agathe on the bed and took up Agathe's hands in her own. "Tell me more. You must hold nothing back from me."

So encouraged, Agathe said, "Efthalia has sunkissed hair, and today when I saw her across the room, I like the sun longed to kiss her cheeks." She paused hesitant to bring this last part up, "But she is the only child of an olive merchant and has been promised in marriage to a wealthy landowner with acres of olive trees on his estate." 

"Oh, forget the husband to be." Aphrodite squeezed her hands. "That's not a problem." She coaxed with a smile, "What is the problem, Agathe? How can I help you this time?"

Agathe wanted to cover her face, but love was holding her hands. "When I sang my poem of love, Efthalia wasn't moved. I left her a gift of hillside plucked flowers symbolizing imagination and joy, and she didn't acknowledge them. Didn't bring them with her."

Aphrodite smiled beautifully and the room filled with the power of her presence. She said gently, "Agathe, what was the color of Efthalia's nose when you saw her? After you gave her lupins gathered on the hillside."

Agathe didn't ask how Aphrodite knew the type of flower, because goddess. "Her nose?" Agathe thought back, "It was a little pink. You know," she waggled her fingers, "Sun kissed."

"No," Aphrodite leaned over and whispered a word in her ear, "allergic." She tapped Agathe's nose. "You made your love sneeze, which while it pushes air from the lungs like a sigh is not the love response that we want. That was why her poetry warned you of the disease of love. Not a rejection of you, but your gift. Now," Aphrodite sat up. Suddenly brisk, like a free breeze from the sea. With a firmly soft hand, she brushed back a strand of Agathe's hair. "Beloved child, this is no light love I'm giving you. You must ask yourself, what makes your beloved's heart glad?"

Agathe didn't have to think too long on that. "Poetry. Oh, her songs are so beautiful and her voice is like the beat of my heart. She sings about the doom of any hope for love." Agathe cast her mind for details. "She walks along the seashore every day." She felt she had to add something, so she added doubtfully, "I guess, weaving." Because Efthalia came to every weaving gathering held in every gynecium of the city. 

"Pft," said Aphrodite. "If she spends her time in a gynecium singing songs about thwarted love, it's not weaving that makes her heart light, but a longing for love." She stood up to pace the small room. "What you must do is go to the shore where she likes to walk and play your lyre with a melody that melts with the sound of the sea." She winked at Agathe. "I was born in the sea and know very well it is full of desire. You must sing about how cruel it is when love is thwarted by those who value money over love."

"Is that what is on her mind?" asked Agathe. "Is that why she sings beautiful songs about how her every hope of love is thwarted?"

"Yes," said the deathless goddess solemnly. "Now sing that song, and meet her eyes as she passes you. Do not look away. Those that council shy glances are very wrong. The eyes are the porches to the soul by which one may find entry to the courtyard of the heart."

"Is that all?" asked Agathe doubtfully.

"No, of course not." Aphrodite tapped her lips with her index finger. "When you leave her a gift, do not leave her flowers. Gather seashells placed together as they were a flower. Soon, she will be the one who pursues you. Soon she will be the one leaving you gifts." Aphrodite placed her hands on Agathe's shoulders and gazed deeply into her heart. "Even if she doesn't want to, soon she will be the one filled with desire."

With that Aphrodite melted away into a golden haze. Leaving Agathe to sigh again. 

Aphrodite's timing was perfect as always, because that was when Agathe's mother came in. "I thought I heard voices."

"Hmm…" said Agathe. "I was just playing my lyre."

But her mother looked at the golden light still glimmering around the room in horror. "Were you speaking with Aphrodite again?"

"I… yes," admitted Agathe. 

"Oh, Agathe, you must be more careful." Her mother fluttered about the room in worry. "The gods can be capricious and cruel. Especially Aphrodite." Then her mother tried to fill her ears with warnings about sea foam and primal forces when all Agathe longed to be doing was to go down to the sea shore and none of that would be a problem as long as Agathe filled her heart with love. 

She kissed her mother's cheek. "It's fine. I've gotta go now." She ran out of the room

She gathered some shells by the sea shore, and with some seagrass and pitch adhesive bound them together to form a budding flower. The next morning, she left it where she'd left the flowers on her love's window sill and went down to the sea. She melted her song with the ocean and as Efthalia walked slowly by, Agathe met her gaze. Agathe sang about the cruelty of those who do not understand love. She sang about the sweet pain of love denied in its bud.

Efthalia's limitless pool eyes filled with tears, but she did not look away. 

The next day, when Agathe went out to get water from the well, there was a sea shell flower waiting for her. No, bud, but this flower seemed almost ready to open. But smothered in the leaves of an olive tree that almost obscured the flower. The pale pink shell at the heart of the flower taunted Agathe even more than the olive branches.

She almost ran down to the seashore when it was time for Efthalia to go for her walk. Agathe's heart pounded to see the sea shell flower clasped in Efthalia's hands. She let her hands fall silent on the lyre so she could pick up her own seashell flower, the olive leaves bent away. Her heart almost stopped beating when Efthalia dashed across the sand to the rocks where Agathe sat and kissed her cheek. Only to quake Agathe's heart by running back to where the waves caressed the sand. Blushing. Glancing over her shoulder at Agathe alone while all around them the cries of the fishermen coming home with their catch seemed to taunt Agathe with possibility. 

There was nothing for it but to weave a new flower. This one where the shells were fanned to create a fully open flower. Pink and creamy pale shells while at the center were shells with a giddy sort of pearlescence. 

Then there were horrible hours to wait for Efthalia to walk by. To feel her heart explode when she saw that Efthalia held her new offering in her hands. When it was Efthalia who came to sit beside her. Took up the lyre from Agathe's hands and sang about how she'd called on Aphrodite out of fear that she would never know love, and the goddess had answered her that she had but to go down to the shore and look out to find it.

Then singing stopped so they could hold hands. Carefully. Cautiously. They were after all not alone on that beach. Of course, there were chores, so they had to go home, but before Efthalia left she invited Agathe to visit her in her home. "We could weave together in my home's gynecium."

No weaving was done there, unless one counted fingers and tongues, and delving for further gasped delights. That day as they explored, they found not one pearl, but two.

Afterwards though, Efthalia showed Agathe the chest that sat at the foot of her bed. "It's full of finely woven linens for my wedding."

Agathe, thinking to her Homer, said, "We could slow down the weaving. Unravel the garments each night." 

Efthalia sighed, "Then I would be sent in a sack to my wedding. This chest was my father's gift to me when I protested at his choice of husband." She flipped open the lid of the chest. Painted inside were two sets of opposing scenes. 

On one side, a girl scorned her marital suitor, was cast out of her home, became a red footed pornai, and was transformed by judgemental gods into a rabbit to be endlessly chased by wolves. On the other side, a girl meekly accepted her husband, was  _ blessed _ with a frightening number of children, spent her time in endless tasks, and after death was allowed into the foggy Elysian fields to wander among the grey asphodel. 

Agathe leaned down to examine the detailed images. "It's hard to tell which one is supposed to be the cautionary tale." 

"I know," said Efthalia wryly.

They laughed together and traded stories meant to frighten them. Discussed how they would repaint the chest and by the time came for Agathe to leave, she knew not just the blush of her love's cheek, but the shape of her dreams.

From that time forward, Agathe visited Efthalia often. They sat next to each other on a dining couch while Efthalia's father and his son-in-law to be chuckled about tracts of land and harvests. That  _ whatever _ man ate food as if Efthalia were not there. He did not shake or sweat or look near to expiring at Efthalia's presence. He had no love in his heart. Agathe was certain that he scorned love.

So in her heart she scorned him, and rained down dire poetry on him. 

As the wedding day approached, Agathe made a new flower out of darkest shells that gleamed inside with pearlescent hope. When she offered it to Efthalia in the quiet of her bedroom, Efthalia gave her one constructed of identical shells in its place. 

Agathe said quickly, "I will call on Aphrodite. She will help us. She helps lovers."

Efthalia took Agathe's hands. "She helped me find you. At least I've known love. At least," but Agathe sipped the words from Efthalia's mouth. 

When she pulled away, Agathe told Efthalia freverently, "Have faith in Aphrodite." 

Agathe went home to her lyre. To her prayer. She said, "Aphrodite, please don't leave me in pain." 

As always, the golden goddess  arrived by flight of doves almost as soon as the words left Agathe's mouth. She slipped in through the door and leaned against the frame. "What is it? How can I help? Why are you suffering?"

" Efthalia is getting married!" said Agathe brushing away a tear.

"That's not the problem," said Aphrodite sitting down next to her and wrapping a loving arm around her shoulders. 

"Oh, but it is." Agathe could not understand how the goddess didn't know the seriousness of the situation, but she would not let this shatter her faith in love. "Her husband to be has said that she'll have to go down to his estate in the county far from the sea. Far her home. Far from me. Far from anything she knows. If she were going to a happy life, I could pine, but this is the life my love fears. I believe," she hesitated a moment, but had to say it, "that he scorns love." 

"That is a problem," said Aphrodite with a briefly stern look that melted as she looked at Agathe. "But," she kissed Agathe's forehead. "Not an insurmountable one. I will take care of everything." A long moment passed as the golden goddess looked into Agathe's eyes with a serious expression. "Do you have faith in me?"

"Yes," said Agathe. Her heart brimmed with love. With absolute conviction. 

"Then that is all you will need." With another kiss, Aphrodite was gone.

Now at first it seemed as if the deathless goddess was just toying with them. Had offered them false promises, because the wedding occurred and nothing happened. Efthalia looked over her shoulder at Agathe as she was bound to a whatever man who didn't tremble at her presence. Who cared more for the feast than for Efthalia, and never once glanced her way. 

Agathe prayed all the night through and fell asleep in exhaustion. 

She woke to find her mother shaking her shoulder. Her mother said, "Did you do this?"

Agathe could only blink weary eyes at her. "Do what?"

"Did you pray to Aphrodite? Did you summon her? I told you that the gods can be capricious and cruel." 

But far from cruel, Agathe found that sometime in the night Efthalia's bridegroom had turned into a pig. While Efthalia's father had turned into an olive tree. 

Efthalia patted her oinker husband's head, who she'd dressed with a pretty ribbon that she'd woven herself while they sat under her father's shade. "Since my husband has no other family, I am now a wealthy woman of property." She smiled at Agathe with the porches of her eyes shining with joy. "I could not possibly marry again while my husband lives. After all, he might become a man again."

"Or love might hold us in her arms forever," said Agathe, who had already packed up her belongings so she could move into Efthalia's home by the sea. Her mother tried to protest, but Agathe's brothers, rich only in Dionysian delight and philosophy, were just as happy for her to be happy and not to have to scrape together coins for her dowry.

Of course, the lovers invited Aphrodite to their courtyard decorated with seashells pressed into the plaster as giddy flowers so she could hear them play love songs, while the oinker played in the fountain, and the sea breeze ruffled the branches of Efthalia's olive tree father. 

They had the story of all this painted onto the lid of the chest at the foot of their bed, while the outside was painted with what might be flowers or might be shells, and was certainly inscribed with praises of Aphrodite herself. 


End file.
